Xhen wrote:As usual the mob has tried to change the subject instead of addressing what I wrote. Please defend the Obama administration's decision not to prosecute a blatant case of voter intimidation. I'd like to hear it.

Please defend the invasion of Iraq. In terms of damage to America and your Constitution, the invasion of Iraq is much more important.

Xhen wrote:As usual the mob has tried to change the subject instead of addressing what I wrote. Please defend the Obama administration's decision not to prosecute a blatant case of voter intimidation. I'd like to hear it.

Like talking around each other is anything new on a political forum. Can you say you don't do that?

But to address the case you're itching to have prosecuted: what acts of intimidation are the New Black Panthers alleged to have engaged in? Remember, just standing there being black doesn't count.

ILvEowyn wrote:But to address the case you're itching to have prosecuted: what acts of intimidation are the New Black Panthers alleged to have engaged in? Remember, just standing there being black doesn't count.

How about standing in front of the entrance in paramilitary garb, brandishing nightsticks, and closing ranks when white voters attempted to enter? Does that count?

ILvEowyn wrote:But to address the case you're itching to have prosecuted: what acts of intimidation are the New Black Panthers alleged to have engaged in? Remember, just standing there being black doesn't count.

How about standing in front of the entrance in paramilitary garb, brandishing nightsticks, and closing ranks when white voters attempted to enter? Does that count?

I saw the Youtube video of what I think you're referring to. There were 2 guys covering about 5 feet of an entryway that was about 30 feet across. They were hardly preventing people from getting in. The uniforms are irrelevent. I only saw one of the two holding a weapon, and that was a night stick. I don't think it's such a clear cut case as the obviously disgruntled person in that article you posted made it out to be.

Doesn't a thread already exist to talk about Republicans? Or does even a thread about Democratic peculiarities have to be about Republicans?

ToshoftheWuffingas wrote:Perhaps Xhen could provide a link to footage of the incident. Then we could compare it to people going to the town hall rallies with firearms.Or does colour make a difference?

Oh, the black guy with the firearm. I still wonder why the mainstream media worked so hard to crop the picture so you didn't see his race. But he is not quite the same as the subject of this thread, which is about Democrats. He's probably a racist white guy just like all the other tea party protesters anyway.

Rule 11 requires the attorey or a party representing herself to sign the pleadings, and by signing certifies certain things:

(1) it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass, cause unnecessary delay, or needlessly increase the cost of litigation;

(2) the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law;

(3) the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and

(4) the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on belief or a lack of information

That is not a very high standard, and I do not see any way that a supervising attorney in the DOJ could conclude that Rule 11 required dismissal IF that person had not looked at what the attorneys who filed the action felt were the underlying facts. So, I doubt that the reason the supervisors in the DOJ wanted the case dismissed was a lack of factual basis. Something else was going on, and I am not in a position to speculate on what it was.

This could go equally well in either the Repblicn or Democratic thread. So, I flipped a coin and here it is.

Atty General Holder was on Face The Nation today and sounded to me as if he would prefer to have the trial of KSH in Federal court. I agree with him. That court could be held in NYC, DC, a military base somewhere or at the bottom of a salt mine, so long as it follows the federal court procedure.

I also hope that the Congress will leave money in the budget to move the Guantanamo people out to Illinois--or somewhere. Moving them individually seems unreasonably expensive, since nearly anywhere they are moved will need modification. Why modify all those individual places, when you can modify one place?

I thought he answered the issues well. He can't do much about Congress's inability to get together on an immigration policy, but he--or any Attorney General of any party-- should pay attention to the principle of federal supremacy. The GOP would surely react if a state were to outlaw US military bases in that state and order existing ones closed because the people of the state didn't agree with US military policy.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this yet. Reactions range fro saying this is proof the press took sides, to saying that this is much ado about nothing even if reporters openly talked about spiking stories and making singling people out to accuse of racism. It seems that there is something to the accusation that liberals and progressives cry racism whenever they lose an argument.

Sources, some pro and some con - mind, while the CSM is pretty even handed, those embarrassed are going to try to smear it as being as biased as the Daily Caller.

While there is far less to the whole controversy over the private online discussion group than meets the eye, it continues to draw far more attention and comment than the debate we should be having about the future of journalism.

With the exception of Spencer Ackerman’s incredibly stupid and unethical scheme to randomly accuse conservatives of racism, the latest Journolist revelations from The Daily Caller aren’t all that shocking. Ackerman’s modest proposal was this:

If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.

Ackerman specifically wanted to use charges of racism as a weapon against conservatives who were raising questions about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s relationship with the loony Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

[F]ind a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

...

The solution should be obvious: Drop bull**** claims about the unbiased nature of the news media. If journalists come clean about their affiliations and biases — they don’t have to abandon their professionalism, but just admit to the fact that their opinions do, inevitably, color their work — then there’s little risk of embarrassment from leaked emails and discussions.

After all, nobody actually believes that journalists steadfastly keep their opinions out of their work. A little honesty wouldn’t just insulate them from Journolist-style leaks — it would improve their credibility.

Excerpts published Tuesday by a conservative online news site suggest that a group of journalists from the mainstream media discussed ways to shield Barack Obama from criticism during the 2008 presidential election.

Among the strategies put forward: call conservative critics racists.

The excerpts, published by the Daily Caller, come at a sensitive time, with both he political left and right accusing each other of race-baiting.

The NAACP recently accused the “tea party” of sheltering racists in its midst. Shortly after, the National Tea Party Federation expelled Mark Williams, leader of the Tea Party Express, for writing a satirical letter about how “colored people” preferred slavery.

Now, conservative commentators are pointing to the JournoList excerpts as proof that the mainstream media collude to promote a liberal agenda, play the race card, and discredit conservative movements like the tea party.

Reporters fantasizing about ramming conservatives through plate glass windows or gleefully watching Rush Limbaugh perish: Welcome to the wild and wooly new world of journalism courtesy of the JournoList.

A conservative website, the Daily Caller, has begun publishing some of the 25,000 entries by 400 left-leaning journalists who were a part of the online community known as JournoList. In these entries, reporters and media types debate the news of the day, often in intemperate and unguarded terms – like now-former Washington Post reporter David Weigel's suggestion that conservative webmeister Matt Drudge "set himself on fire."

Another suggested that members of the group label some Barack Obama as critics racists in their reporting.

It is possible, perhaps probable, that the fedora-coiffed journalists of old might have entertained similar thoughts about political characters of the day. But JournoList raises the question of how thoroughly the tone and character of the no-holds-barred blogosphere are reshaping the mainstream media.

While it is not clear that the JournoList exchanges influenced coverage, they parroted the snarky language of the blogosphere as well as its pandering to political biases – in some cases, suggesting that those biases should be reflected in news coverage.

Ackerman fits the profile of the media's new breed of "blogger/journalists" who write partisan-leaning blogs under the imprimatur of old-school mastheads. One of Ackerman's blogs is called "Attackerman," and he said in a recent interview that "passion is looked down upon in general in journalism, simply because it's a bourgeois institution. If I come across as unprofessional, oh well."

For conservatives like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Ackerman's words are a gift. "It's encouraging for commonsense conservatives who are frustrated with media cover-ups and biases to see truth revealed," she wrote on her Facebook page

Yet media experts warn against casting the mainstream media as a monolithic unit.

"You can't just talk about 'the media' in this case," says Mike Hoyt, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. "There are all kinds of reporters, and some of them are progressives and liberals and some of them aren't."

An email list full of professional journalists discussing how to bend stories to help Democrats.

Topics included:
*Accusing selected individuals on the "right" of being racist in order to intimidate everyone else on the "right" which is rather timely given the NAACP's rather recent unsupported accusation of racism against another group. Pick a target and make an example out of him, trash him, doesn't matter who.
*Labeling all critics of Obama as racist as a tactic.
*Explicitly discussing coordinating the media message to help Obama.
*How to spike any story that might possibly embarrass Obama.
*Fantasizing about the death of prominent conservatives.
*Discussing the best was to attack Palin ever since McCain picked her as his running mate. "Tokenism" was discussed at first, but eventually "stupid" was decided upon.
*How they are all unbiased professionals.

A conservative news organization got hold of the list archive and started publishing these emails publicly. Some news agencies are pretending this isn't happening, others are running stories about how this is much ado about nothing.

A conservative news organization got hold of the list archive and started publishing these emails publicly. Some news agencies are pretending this isn't happening, others are running stories about how this is much ado about nothing.

A conservative news organization is selectively releasing emails...Doesn't that sound a lot like the Shirley Sherrod case? Maybe that's why there's not a big deal being made out of it.

I can’t say that I hold the Daily Caller in much esteem for making a business model out of publishing the contents of supposedly private e-mails from the list-serve Journalist. I have about 10,000 Journolist e-mails in my possession from the roughly 20 months that I was a member of the group. It goes without saying that an organization in possession of these e-mails, as Daily Caller is, would have nearly unlimited degrees of freedom to cut-and-paste evidence together with the aim of either perpetuating a certain narrative or trying to undermine the integrity of a particular journalist. The fact that their revelations seem to be getting more and more trivial perhaps tells you something.

...

A lot of the other comments involved discussions of Democratic or Republican political strategy. Almost always, I made exactly the points in these discussions that I made on FiveThirtyEight. Sometimes, I used the phrasing "we" when participating in these discussions, which I would not ordinarily use on the blog. I’ve disclosed from the first day of FiveThirtyEight’s existence that I’m usually a Democratic voter, and Journolist’s membership consisted of mostly Democrats, so this seemed fairly natural.

So CG, if the implication of your post is that JournoList is something other than a group for mostly Democratic-leaning journalists (i.e. a 'mainstream' group that tries at being neutral), it seems to me like you are mistaken.

It is indeed a trivial revelation, because anybody who is surprised by it (or worse, still denies it) at this stage in the game has either been living under a rock or on a college campus for the last twenty years.

Democratic-leaning journalists? More like apparatchiks. "Journalist' implies at least a superficial attempt at impartiality.

What these clowns were doing is by definition propaganda. And sophomoric propaganda at that.

See, while it is well known that the majority of journalists and news organizations lean towards the Democratic Party, anyone who mentions it is poo-poohed as being somewhat of a conspiracy theorist. Until and unless it is proven with some hard evidence, then it doesn't exist even though everyone knows it exists. Kind of like the slaughter of civilians in our current wars.

Much like Wikileaks, this tells everyone what they already know. But it tells it by saying "here's the proof."

See, while it is well known that the majority of journalists and news organizations lean towards the Democratic Party, anyone who mentions it is poo-poohed as being somewhat of a conspiracy theorist.

It becomes a "conspiracy theory" when one suggests that the news is being reported in such a way that it is unfair or untrue or what have you. The personal leanings of journalists don't really matter that much if they report the news accurately. I have a particular problem with FOX because they'll ask a really provocative or a ridiculous question, but preface it with "You Decide:" and then hide behind the excuse of "well i'm not suggesting that..." MSNBC does stupid things too, though I haven't noticed them using that trick in particular. But there is a difference between those two organizations and, say, the AP, which is generally a lot more respectable.

So I guess what I'm really saying with respect to the articles you posted CG is, so what?

Even if liberal journalists were/wanted to use the racist label as a way to specifically attack conservatives, it isn't surprising because conservatives find their own labels to smear the liberals with (i.e. Breitbart). This seems to be par for the course in journalism today. I'm disheartened by it, but not surprised.

You expect Republican politicians to criticize Democratic administrations and vice versa. But when Democrats start criticizing Democratic administrations, that is news. Someone once said that the headline "Dog bites Man" is not news, but "Man bites Dog" is. We are now starting to get "Democrat bites Democrat" news.

Long-time Democratic pollsters Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen last week took on one of President Barack Obama's most bitter betrayals of his campaign rhetoric and the high hopes of people who voted for him.

Their op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal dealt with race, and it pulled no punches: "Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf."

Cynical? This man with the lofty rhetoric and sermonizing style? Only if you follow his deeds, instead of his words.

Part of the polarization that Barack Obama has caused among the American public has been due to the fact that some people do not look behind rhetoric and symbolism. Such people are prime candidates to become part of the Obama cult. Those who look only at deeds tend to become critics. But those who closely follow both his words and his deeds are the most outraged of all, because of the gross contradictions between those words and those deeds.

Rumors of Congressional Democrats privately expressing disapproval of the Obama administration's actions and policies have been given more credence by such things as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's public criticism of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But when two long-time Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, called President Obama "cynical" and "racially divisive," that was a dramatic statement. It was like saying that the emperor has no clothes.

A much more rhetorically subdued but nevertheless devastating implicit criticism of current government spending policies came from an even more unlikely source: the Congressional Budget Office, whose director is a Democrat.

Without naming names or making political charges, the Congressional Budget Office last week issued a report titled "Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis." The report's dry, measured words paint a painfully bleak picture of the long-run dangers from the current runaway government deficits.

The CBO report points out that the national debt, which was 36 percent of the Gross Domestic Product three years ago, is now projected to be 62 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2010-- and rising in future years.

Tracing the history of the national debt back to the beginning of the country, the CBO finds that the national debt did not exceed 50 percent of GDP, even when the country was fighting the Civil War, the First World War or any other war except World War II. Moreover, a graph in the CBO report shows the national debt going down sharply after World War II, as the nation began paying off its wartime when the war was over.

By contrast, our current national debt is still going up and may end up in "unfamiliar territory," according to the CBO, reaching "unsustainable levels." They spell out the economic consequences-- and it is not a pretty picture.

The nature of our two parties and the differences between them is often difficult to understand for persons who merely observe on the outside without being involved on the inside. for the longest time time, the Democratic Party is set up to allow and even encourage internal debate over policies and directions. The Republican party is far more disciplined and follows the "all dance to the same tune" message in greater numbers than the Dems do.

Will Rogers famously is often quoted as saying he belonged to no organized political party - he was a Democrat. While the Democratic Party has indeed come a long way in terms of organization and other important areas, they still are far more of a diverse group than the Republicans are and that is reflected in their internal debates.

To read reports on internal debates over issues should not be surprising or startling to anyone with any serious experience or knowledge. Democrats biting Democrats has been going on for many decades now and it is not breaking news no matter how the haters of the Democratic party would like to paint it to be.

Furthermore, anyone who knows Patrick Caddell knows he has a history of such statements. This is from his wikipedia entry

His analysis on polls and campaign issues often puts him at odds with the current leadership of the Democratic Party. He has been criticized as often attacking Democratic politicians and predicting the downfall of the Democratic party.[5] Critics point out that he has defended the Bush administration by claiming that Republicans did not exploit the issue of gay marriage in the presidential election of 2004.[citation needed] He also denounced Democrats in the House who voted against the Palm Sunday Compromise, which sought to reinstate Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, as "cold blooded".[citation needed] Caddell is a regular guest on Fox News.

No conviction is a victory for a defendant. Having said the obvious you have to wonder what really happened here. The prosecution failed on 23 of 24 counts to convict the former Illinois governor. That is a very poor batting average.

shiftenter wrote:No conviction is a victory for a defendant. Having said the obvious you have to wonder what really happened here. The prosecution failed on 23 of 24 counts to convict the former Illinois governor. That is a very poor batting average.

The prosecution appears to have been somewhat inept. There are calls for a retrial, as the jury did not rule on the 23 other counts.

It is interesting that the hatred of Rod B. comes from the same quarters that normally would be screaming about "jack-booted government thugs" who are drunk on power persecuting a person over and over again. I wonder what they think when the government fails to convict the former governor on 23 out of 24 charges and the one they got him one was one of the more minor of the lot? Do they attack Blago because he was a member of the hated government and a hated Democrat from the hated city of Chicago or side with the prosecutors and ignore that they too are members of the powerful government who can take a shot at you again and again and again until succcessful? Quite a quandary they find themselves in.

shiftenter wrote:It is interesting that the hatred of Rod B. comes from the same quarters that normally would be screaming about "jack-booted government thugs" who are drunk on power persecuting a person over and over again. I wonder what they think when the government fails to convict the former governor on 23 out of 24 charges and the one they got him one was one of the more minor of the lot? Do they attack Blago because he was a member of the hated government and a hated Democrat from the hated city of Chicago or side with the prosecutors and ignore that they too are members of the powerful government who can take a shot at you again and again and again until succcessful? Quite a quandary they find themselves in.

I'm not certain about normal procedures (portia will know ) but I gather that, rather than a ruling of innocent or guilty being found for the 23 counts, no ruling was delivered by the jury. Thus double jeopardy is not a factor, and it is not exactly "hounding" to call for a retrial on those counts for which a judgment has yet to be made.
And for the record, I couldn't give tuppence whether he's a Democrat or a Republican. He bears all the hallmarks of the average politician; corrupt to the bone.

Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Michelle Antoinette...the news stories about corrupt and incompetent Democrats have become as commonplace as clouds.

The Democrats are cleaning their house. Call me when the GOP actually tries to do something about Ensign or Vitter or Sanford. If you want to just exchange names of corrupt people on each side, I can go shot for shot with you, so to speak.

November looms. Pelosi/Reid will become the next Foley/Mitchell, and there will be naught left but the screeching rearguard on the Puffington Host and TORC

Chances are, if the GOP gains the House back, it will be by a slim majority, and the Democrats will still likely retain the Senate, albeit by a slim majority. That's a far cry from "naught left".

I certainly don't believe that our president is a complete idiot; his hyper-partisan brain certainly generates enough electricity to allow him to flail around in the Gulf with Sasha.

seriously, what the...?

Last edited by ILvEowyn on Wed Aug 18, 2010 9:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

Entmooting ... yes, I fully realize that since no actual verdict of guilty or not guilty was rendered by the jury that he can be tried again. No problem with that. My point is that much of the loathing of Rod B. seems to come from the right wing because of his connection with Chicago (a city they seem to hate), the Democratic Party (a party they seem to loathe) and because it was the previous seat of Barack Obama (a President they were out to destroy from Day One). This puts them in the unique position of advocating the Blago retrial to get him the type of justice that they feel is appropriate. In other cases, these are much the same folks who scream about "jack-booted government thugs" (I love when they use that phrase) who are abusing their unlimited government powers to persecute the innocent.

Its just a very ironic position they find themselves in is all I am saying.